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Gehennans
| notable members = Mahani | tblColour = Purple | textColour = Black }} Gehennans ( ゲヘナん, Gehena-jin) are humanoid aliens possessed of especially powerful prescient abilities. Native to Planet Medley in the East Galaxy, they are rarely seen off-world. Overview Gehennans are tall humanoids, whose most immediately striking physical feature is their blue skin and their bodies' strange interaction with ki, seeming to shift and swirl with energy when they possess large amounts of it. When alive at all, their hair exhibits this characteristic, but if they boost their power it becomes more noticeable and spreads to their entire body. They are, of course, naturally capable of shaping ki. Culturally, the Gehennans have a rich philosophical system, formulated by their great theologians in ages past, which also guides their systems of ki combat. They hold that the underlying forces of all creation are the realm of spiritual light and the materialistic realm, filled with darkness, and they hold that the universe is the representation of the interaction between these two. While Gehennans will utilize the arts of the "dark realm" in techniques, the combating of those objectives which they associate with it is a central tenet of their beliefs. They accomplish this by meditation and the usage of their divinatory skills to ascertain and address issues in what they perceive as the struggle between realms. On the rare occasion that Gehennans venture off-world, this belief system has proven popular with soldiers, but they themselves have become scorned and disgusted by many, because when they ascertain a need, they do not deign to explain why they address it as they do, and so many groups have come to know the Gehennans merely as the race who destroyed something precious, not having the knowledge of the future that those Gehennans did. Those few Gehennans who deign to make study of the outside world and of why their race acts as it does have concluded that the race's greatest flaw is its general sense of aloofness, sometimes bordering on arrogance. The primary characteristic of Gehennans as a species is their unique system of psychic knowledge. Unlike most beings, which require a crystal ball to perform divination, Gehennans are capable of accessing divinatory abilities at any moment, simply by concentrating. When they do so, their eyes glow, one red and one green, and a system of purple markings appears on their foreheads, which they believe signifies their connection with the interaction of light and dark forces in the universe around them. While concentrating in this way, their power levels increase markedly, and they are capable of discerning truths about what has occurred or will occur, as long as they can maintain their concentration on what they seek. The more practiced a Gehennan is with this, the greater their foreknowledge, and the quicker their mind becomes while utilizing it, in order to act on the information they receive. When a Gehennan has truly mastered this, incidences of significance become apparent to them even without the accessing of this system, and they are capable of drawing power from what they call the "background ki" of the universe. If such a master should feel an urgent purpose through this sense, they instinctively enter into a far deeper mode of prescience, wherein three rows of eyes appear, and a far more complex pattern glows across their face as their energy levels rise dramatically. In this form, the individual's innermost instincts and morals guide them, but they are incapable of utilizing their higher faculties, such as speech or self-control to do anything other than accomplish their goals, and complex tasks can be beyond their understanding. In exchange for this loss of self-awareness, they begin to act on instincts they can't even comprehend, responding to the smallest shifts in the future they foresee or the world around them, and a masterful degree of control over their bodily functions, being able to adapt to almost any situation by adjusting their homeostatic balance. Only the completion of their task or an overwhelming shock can bring them out of that Prescient Mode, since their own willpower is unable to accomplish that feat. In the case of some, such as Mahani, this need-driven form can persist for years on end. The danger of this mode is that, should the ki around the user become, so to speak, devoted towards a cause, the user will be overwhelmed, and their marks will grow either red or green, for "dark" or "light realms" respectively, and they shall be under the control of that ki, with not even a shred of themselves remaining for the duration. Trivia *The name "Gehennans" was based on Gehenna, a place near Jerusalem that became notorious for its human sacrifices and was later used as a descriptor for Hell in the Old Testament, reflecting the way in which the race does as it believes is right, but is scorned by others, and the way in which its efforts to address a need can be twisted to dark purposes. *The Gehennan system of belief is based loosely on Manichaeism, while their psychic abilities were inspired by Dune. Category:Thepantheon Category:Species